Women letter carriers in Chicago

The National Postal Museum has a photograph, dated 1944, of Jeanette Lee gathering mail from a street collection box. Its record calls her the first female letter carrier in Chicago, and the museum's research pages on women in the postal service caption her the same way. The record says nothing else about her, not her route and not how long she served. The photographer is unknown.

Women on city routes before 1944

Women carried mail in the United States long before 1944, mostly outside the cities. The Postal Service historian traces women on contract routes to about 1860 and on rural routes to 1899. City delivery, in the museum's words, stayed man's work well into the twentieth century.

The first women known to deliver mail in an American city started on November 6, 1917, in Washington, DC. Permelia S. Campbell and Nellie M. McGrath took routes near Union Station as temporary substitute carriers. Their work was judged highly satisfactory, but after about two weeks they were taken off their routes and offered work indoors. Later that month the department asked eight of its largest post offices to test women as carriers for 15 days in December, when hundreds of extra carriers were hired for the Christmas mail anyway. That December, dozens of women delivered mail experimentally in Chicago, New York and St. Louis.

So the museum's label needs a little care. Women walked Chicago routes in the 1917 test, as short term substitutes.

Two wars, two waves

After the First World War, most women carriers gave up their jobs to returning veterans. An order of 1902 had also kept women who married from being reappointed, and it stayed in force until November 1921, when Postmaster General Will Hays lifted the ban.

The Second World War brought women back. In 1943 Postmaster General Frank Walker said the service would have to rely on many women and on men above draft age, though at first he said women would not carry the mail. The museum says he had to take that back once more than five percent of his carrier force was serving abroad. During the war women again worked as letter carriers in cities including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Lee's photograph comes from those years.

After the war, most of these women left the service or were let go. In 1955 there were 95 women city carriers and 332 women rural carriers in the whole country, together less than one percent of all carriers. Change came in the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy ordered in 1962 that federal appointments and promotions be made without regard to sex, and the number of women city carriers rose from 104 in 1960 to 3,500 in 1968. By 2007 about 59,700 women served as city carriers.

From the National Postal Museum collection, record A.2006⁠-⁠27.